03/15/2010

It has become increasingly common for brain images to be proffered as
evidence in criminal and civil litigation. This Article - the collaborative
product of scholars in law and neuroscience - provides three things. First, it
provides the first introduction, specifically for legal thinkers, to brain
imaging. It describes in accessible ways the new techniques and methods that
the legal system increasingly encounters. Second, it provides a tutorial on how
to read and understand a brain-imaging study. It does this by providing an
annotated walk-through of the recently-published work (by three of the authors
- Buckholtz, Jones, and Marois) that discovered the brain activity underlying a
person’s decisions: a) whether to punish someone; and b) how much to punish.
The annotation uses the “Comment” feature of the Word software to supply
contextual and step-by-step commentary on what unfamiliar terms mean, how and
why brain imaging experiments are designed as they are, and how to interpret
the results. Third, the Article offers some general guidelines about how to
avoid misunderstanding brain images in legal contexts and how to identify when
others are misusing brain images. The Article is a product of the "Law and
Neuroscience Project", supported by the MacArthur Foundation.

False confessions are a major cause of wrongful convictions. In many
countries, physical abuse and torture are still used to extract confessions
from criminal suspects. Cultural orientations such as collectivism and power
distance may influence the tendency to confess, and a suspect's past experience
in a country that uses physical abuse during interrogations may render suspects
fearful and more prone to falsely confess. After looking at interrogations
outside the United States, we examine the issue of why false confessions
sometime occur in the U.S. legal system. We prove an overview of the stages of
a typical interrogation and provide a psychological analysis of the array of
tactics used by police interrogators. Finally, we describe several reforms that
hold the potential to dramatically reduce the risk of false confessions.

03/14/2010

As some of you may already know, The Garden of Forking Paths was recently shut down. I, for one, enjoyed the blog throughout
the years.As such, I thought that the closing
of the Garden left a cyber-void that needed to be filled.So,
with John Martin Fischer’s blessing, a
few of us got together to develop a new free will & action theory
blog—Flickers of Freedom. We just launched the blog this
morning, so hopefully you will drop by to check it out. Neil Levy will
be posting the first substantive piece soon. So, check back soon!

The LANP--along with the Oxford Center for Neuroethics--is sponsoring an upcoming conference on bioprediction (see here for details). The conference will take place in Washington DC from May 8th through the 9th immediately leading up to the annual meeting of the Neuroethics Society. Both events should be interesting and informative. So, hopefully, we will see some of you there!